Over the last two decades a new type of song has emerged. Today's hits bristle with "hooks," musical burrs designed to snag your ear every seven seconds. Painstakingly crafted to tweak the brain's delight in melody, rhythm, and repetition, these songs are industrial-strength products made for malls, casinos, the gym, and the Super Bowl halftime show. The tracks are so catchy, and so potent, that you can't not listen to them. Traveling from New York...

Millennia ago, Ginny's family ranch was all grass and rock and wild horses. A thousand years hence, it'll all be peacefully underwater. In the matter-of-fact here and now, though, it's a hotbed of lust and resentment, and about to turn ugly, because Ginny's just cheated on her husband Dan with the man who lives next door. Out on these prairies, word travels fast: everyone seems to know everyone's business. They know what Ginny did, and they know Ginny...

Teo Toak, one of eight brothers, is a crooked deal maker in fictional Johnsonville, Fla. An unscrupulous bail bondsman by day, Teo moonlights as a slumlord while keeping close tabs on his errant embarrassment of a son, Feddy, a drifter who lives on one of his father's properties and dates Sharon, a white unlicensed day-care provider with a penchant for black men. Feddy's 22-year-old son, Jesmond, repossesses rental furniture with an iron fist and...

Earphones Award Winner from Audiofile Magazine!
Stany Nyandwi's gift for communicating with chimpanzees is so special that world-renowned primatologist Dr. Jane Goodall has called him a "chimpanzee whisperer." His skills and devotion to these creatures—our closest living relatives, with whom we share 98.7 percent of our DNA—have earned him international awards and sent him on travels within Africa and around the world. But he began life in...

"The Golden Gate Bridge is the most famous bridge in the world. It is also, not entirely coincidentally, the world's only bright-orange bridge. But it wasn't supposed to be that way. In this book, fellow bridge-lovers Dave Eggers and Tucker Nichols tell the story of how it happened - how a bridge that some people wanted to be red and white, and some people wanted to be yellow and black, and most people wanted simply to be gray, instead became, thanks...